Marcus Eldridge Pryor

You are standing in Danny Ruiz Combs's kitchen, and the refrigerator is humming the only note it knows. Seven minutes in him. His feet are cold on the linoleum. His belly pushes at the waistband of the pajama pants. His knees complain when you shift your weight. The whole house is asleep, a wife's slow breathing down the hall, a dog's tags clicking once. None of it is yours.

The glass of water in his hand has gone warm. He is forty-five and he is good at nothing you want. He can fill out a form in Pike County with his eyes shut. He can't run a flight of stairs without his chest tightening. You wanted something, and the wanting is a stone you cannot swallow. His quiet is too soft. You go back to the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin.

The car is already moving. Dark highway, the engine's low hum in your spine. The wheel is under your palms, leather worn smooth. The car has drifted a foot toward the line. You pull it back in one clean movement, and your hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because that is how you drive. The turn signal ticks on for an exit that isn't his. Dash glow lies on your knuckles. Nashville is a smear of orange behind you.

Then the jaw. He is chewing gum, spearmint gone to nothing, and your teeth keep working it without being asked. Under the gum is the ghost of smoke, the mouth of a man who quit and still tastes it.

The wheel gives you the first one: a cold church lot, a Wednesday, his hands gripping this same leather while a man named Pastor Gaines prayed over the hood of a car that wouldn't start. He felt embarrassed and grateful, both at once, and he kept chewing the gum so no one would see his mouth shake.

The jacket against your back, canvas, stiff at the seams, hands you the morning. He pulled it off a hook by the door at dusk, one sleeve and then the other, the cuffs worn soft. His shoulders are broad under it, the build of a man who lifts cases for a living. In the pocket his fingers find a box cutter's weight and a folded glove, and the aisle comes up under you: three a.m., pallets of cases, the long fluorescent hum, the satisfaction of a shelf made perfect while the city sleeps. He liked that. Nobody saw it, and he liked it anyway.

Long hair brushes your collar, heavy and silver. He was proud of it and never said so. His thumb, on the wheel, finds a callus at its base, and you feel his tired contentment. He is single, and that doesn't hurt him. There is a back alley by his place where the neon bleeds red across wet brick, and on Saturdays he sits on the step with one beer and listens to guitars leak out of the bars.

His lower back aches in a clean, earned way. His eyes are brown and steady, and the road holds.

You lift one hand and turn it over, palm up in the dash light. It is dark, broad, cracked at the knuckles, and calloused where the cutter rides. You look up into the mirror and meet his eyes.

"Hello, Marcus," you say, and the voice is low, and it is not yours. The signal keeps ticking. Three miles from his door, and you wonder how long before the wanting comes back.